The South African city of Cape Town, which nearly ran out of water this year, could beat future droughts by cutting down non-native trees including pine, acacia and eucalyptus, according to a study released Friday.

An eco-friendly, coating-free strategy has been developed to make solid surfaces liquid-repellent, which is crucial for the transportation of large quantities of liquids through pipes. Researchers from KAUST's Water Desalination ...

By combining multiple nanomaterials into a single structure, scientists can create hybrid materials that incorporate the best properties of each component and outperform any single substance. A controlled method for making ...

For years, public service announcements warned Israelis to save water: Take shorter showers. Plant resilient gardens. Conserve. Then Israel invested heavily in desalination technology and professed to have solved the problem ...

New research suggests there's a large untapped resource for many of the increasingly water-limited regions of the U.S. and around the world: brackish groundwater, which, in theory at least, would require much less energy ...

High-temperature desalination technologies can efficiently reduce the concentrations of a chemical element in seawater to make it an effective substitute for fresh water. Research into how the element boron evaporates could ...

Recent research published in a paper in TECHNOLOGY reported a novel design of a scale-up nanoporous membrane centrifuge (see Figure 1 (a), (b), (c), and (d)) proposed for reverse osmosis desalination, with proof of concept ...

Desalination

Desalination, desalinization, or desalinisation refers to any of several processes that remove some amount of salt and other minerals from water. More generally, desalination may also refer to the removal of salts and minerals, as in soil desalination.

Water is desalinated in order to convert salt water to fresh water so it is suitable for human consumption or irrigation. Sometimes the process produces table salt as a by-product. Desalination is used on many seagoing ships and submarines. Most of the modern interest in desalination is focused on developing cost-effective ways of providing fresh water for human use in regions where the availability of fresh water is, or is becoming, limited.

Large-scale desalination typically uses extremely large amounts of energy as well as specialized, expensive infrastructure, making it very costly compared to the use of fresh water from rivers or groundwater.

However, along with recycled water this is one of the few non-rainfall dependent water sources particularly relevant to countries like Australia which traditionally have relied on rainfall in dams to provide their drinking water supplies.

The world's largest desalination plant is the Jebel Ali Desalination Plant (Phase 2) in the United Arab Emirates. It is a dual-purpose facility that uses multi-stage flash distillation and is capable of producing 300 million cubic metres of water per year. By comparison the largest desalination plant in the United States is located in Tampa Bay, Florida, and operated by Tampa Bay Water, which began desalinating 34.7 million cubic meters of water per year in December 2007. The Tampa Bay plant runs at around 12% the output of the Jebel Ali Desalination Plants. The largest desalination plant in South Asia is the Minjur Desalination Plant near Chennai in India which produces 100,000 cubic meters of water per day, or 36.5 million cubic meters of water per year. According to International Desalination Association 2009, there are 14,451 desalination plants in operation worldwide, producing 59.9 million cubic meters per day (15.8 billion gallons a day), a year on year increase of 12.3%.